Page 77 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
She asked quietly, “We’re back to this again? Me trying to touch you and you saying no?”
Hawk closed his eyes, swallowing a groan. She remembered. God help him.
She said, “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to ask you something. Then I’ll take a shower, and you’re going to sit over there on that chair and think about what I’ve proposed. After my shower, you can answer me.” When he opened his eyes, she was staring at him with unwavering intensity, those Caribbean-blue eyes piercing him to the bottom of his soul. “I want an honest answer, and I want you to mean it, either way.”
Hawk was as afraid of the question as he was what his answer might be. He croaked, “What’s the question?”
“Let’s be lovers until I leave.”
The stallions inside his chest reared up en masse, pawing the air and whinnying.
He managed a choked, “That’s not a question.”
She smiled, stepped closer, lifted her other hand to his chest where she spread her palm flat. “Can we please be lovers until I leave?”
“No.” That single word was the hardest thing he’d ever said in his entire life.
“You’re supposed to think about it!”
“You’re not supposed to be under the influence of mind-altering substances when you ask!”
“Well how long am I going to be under the influence then?”
“I don’t know,” he groaned, stepping back as she pressed against him. “Two or three days. I’m not sure.”
“Oh,” she said, brightening. “Okay.” She stepped away from him, smiling. “I can do two or three days. But after that you’re toast, bird man. Now can you please show me the way to the shower?”
Stunned, barely functioning, Hawk pointed to the porch. “Outside. On the right. Use the pulley to start the flow.”
Her smile grew dazzling. “You should see your face right now. God, I wish I had a camera.”
Then she turned and made her way to the porch, whistling, while Hawk cursed every deity he’d ever heard of for his miserable bad luck.
Love had finally found him, and so had love’s bastard brother.
Misery.
Jack’s sleep had been deep and restful, free of the monsters that usually stalked her dreams.
She’d awoken to the sound of gently falling rain, feeling peaceful, the drug Hawk had given her still numbing the pain and keeping her afloat on cloud nine. He’d been acting weird again, resisting her advances though she knew he wanted her as much as she wanted him. It was sweet, she decided, turning her face up to the spray of water. Sweet and silly, because she wasn’t going to stop wanting him when this drug wore off.
She wasn’t ever going to stop wanting him. How could she have thought otherwise?
The gravity shower was ingenious. With a bladder somewhere high up in the branches so the stored water was warmed by the sun, it operated with a simple pulley system to turn the spray on and off. There was handmade soap and some kind of citrusy-smelling gel in an unlabeled jar she assumed was shampoo; and she washed her hair and body in dappled sunlight, mindless of the strips of fabric on her back that were slowly peeling off and landing at her feet in sodden blobs. When she was finished, she dried off with a towel and went back inside.
Hawk was sitting with his head in his hands on the bed, looking as if he’d been run over by a truck.
“Did you sleep at all?” she asked.
His head jerked up. He stared at her, emerald eyes bloodshot and wild, and cleared his throat.
He seemed to be doing that a lot.
Jack had wrapped the towel around her body, but unwound it and began to blot her wet hair with it. Hawk turned beet red, shot to his feet, and turned his back, standing with his hands on his hips.
He muttered to himself, “I’m going to kill that old man.”
“Hey, what’s this?” Jack picked up a package wrapped with a white silk ribbon from the dresser.
